The Neanderthals and"godly Christians" in the Daily Press' circulation area will have a cow over today's main editorial in that newspaper which "celebrates" the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling last week upholding Judge Arenda Wright Allen's February 13, 2014, decision that found Virginia's same sex marriage bans to violate the U.S. Constitution. In the minds of these misogynists, religious freedom means that they get to force their toxic religious beliefs on all citizens. That even the Daily Press - hardly the most liberal of newspapers - sees the ruling as moving Virginia toward the right side of history vindicates Attorney General Mark Herrings decision not to defend the animus inspired Marshall-Newman Amendment. Here are editorial highlights:
The prospect of marriage equality makes many people uncomfortable. It makes some very angry. To stop it, opponents successfully amended the state constitution to define marriage exclusively as between one man and one woman, winning 57 percent of the vote in 2006.
But eight years later, the landscape has changed. . . . . preventing access to marriage, and the benefits it entails, is a losing cause. We celebrate this decision as a step forward for Virginia, one that moves the commonwealth away from discrimination and toward the right side of history.
The trend here is obvious. The United States is moving toward recognition of same-sex marriage. A great many court cases find judges reaching a common conclusion: Marriage is a fundamental right of American citizens and attempts to limit access to it amounts to a constitutional violation.
That was a key part of the Fourth Circuit's ruling, which upheld the decision made by U.S. District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen earlier this year. She found the commonwealth's marriage amendment, which reflects the Biblical definition of a union between one man and one woman, in violation to the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
Judge Allen took the additional step of drawing a parallel between this case and the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia. That decision invalidated the commonwealth's anti-miscegenation laws, which banned interracial marriages.
It is coincidence that Virginia finds itself as a high-profile battleground once again in the national debate over marriage. But the nod to history was not lost on those writing for the Fourth Circuit majority, who made a point of calling Virginia's prohibition of same-sex marriage a "type of segregation." We cannot disagree.
As we have said many times previously, gays and lesbians live and work in the commonwealth. They own homes, pay taxes and vote here. Like their heterosexual neighbors, they aspire to see their communities enjoy good schools, safe streets and a high quality of life.
The Fourth Circuit's ruling means Virginia is headed in that direction as well. We celebrate these developments and look forward to the day, which now seems inevitable, when all our citizens are free to love and legally marry whom they choose.
It is no coincidence that many of those in Virginia either supported or are the direct descendants of those who supported slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws, "Massive Resistance" and bans on interracial marriage. It also is no coincidence that in each and every one of these past horrors in Virginia was justified by selective quotes from the Bible and claimed "sincerely held religious belief." The toxicity of religion and the Bible seems to never end.
No comments:
Post a Comment